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Sometimes You Just Gotta Rant

So, this is a thing: There’s a billboard in Utah for a dating website called WhereWhitePeopleMeet.com. (I’m not going to dignify either the site or the news outlet that broke it by linking. If you want to dig deeper, I’m sure you have a favorite search engine.) When I saw this site posted on Facebook, there were (predictably) a cadre of white guys chiming in with dipshittery about “well, black people can have their own dating sites…” and challenging anyone to find something fundamentally wrong with this.

As both a white person and a former employee of a well-trafficked Internet dating service, I have things to say.

If you’re an American looking for a dating service where it’s easy to meet white people, your options are damn near any of them. The mainstream sites in America are all predominantly white. All of them. This is because, despite the racist anxieties clung to by so many conservatives, America is predominantly white. In a state like Utah, which is even whiter than the nation at large, the local pool on a mainstream dating website will be whiter still, and when you take into consideration differences in Internet and smartphone usage/penetration, then even that majority will be overrepresented.

To spell it out for any Fox News viewers who might have wandered to this page by accident: Minorities have specialty dating (and other) services because they are minorities and finding people like them (which, for good or ill, is most people’s preference) is harder than it is for those of us in the majority.

Put even more simply: If you believe that this website exists to overcome real obstacles keeping single white people apart, or that it legitimately addresses some fundamental issue of fairness, the nicest thing that might be said about you is that you are pathologically inattentive.

The point of WhereWhitePeopleMeet.com is not to help white people meet (especially white Utahns). The point of this site is obvious: It exists for those who want to avoid non-white people, and who want to connect with others who have that priority. In that sense, I suppose it’s another minority dating website, though its branding is disingenuous.

You can fill in the blanks yourself about what the underlying motives might be for the site’s users. In any case, if you’re not somewhere on the scale between uncomfortable and appalled about such a site, we’re going to have difficulty being friends.